Unknown - 22_Cat_In_An_Ultramarine_Scheme

Gangsters was clearly not that kind of place. Nicky’s urgent whistle alone showed that.

Van turned slowly, like the Queen Mary, annoyed by the streetwise hailing.

“The Mob Museum,” Uncle Macho Mario Fontana mouthed reverently from the bottom of an escalator flanked by neon cityscapes of Chicago.

“Not likely to be on the level of the Guggenheim at the Venetian,” Van suggested under her breath as she and Temple hustled through the milling gamblers. “This is going to be a bigger disaster than the revamped Aladdin was, but I suppose Nicky wants gainful employment for his playboy brothers.”

“They have made a lucrative go of the limo service,” Temple said.

“What have we made quite a go of?” the nearest brother asked.

It could have been Armando. Or Ralph. Their white straw summer fedoras made the look-alike clan even harder to distinguish from one another. What part of tall, dark, and handsome is a hallmark?

“The museum is up here,” Macho Mario gestured from twelve smooth-gliding steps above them. “Watch yer high heels, ladies. We don’t want any unfortunate accidents at Gangsters.”

Nicky had waited to swing onto the moving stairs behind Temple and Van. “Don’t worry,” he advised, “I’ve got your backsides.”

Van visibly bit her tongue, while Temple was tempted to turn around and stick hers out. Nicky was in an ideal position to be cheeky and knew it.

At the escalator’s top, Temple wasn’t surprised to spot a lavish 1930s-style movie theater blinking its neon-bulbed marquee at them like a flirtatious chorus girl’s false eyelashes.

The name between the blinking lights read The Roxie.

“Oh,” Van said, impressed for the first time, “an American movie palace.”

The graduated triangle of Art Deco columns thrust up in step-pyramid glory. Its towering central spire was silhouetted against a twilight-azure sky darkening to a navy blue dusted with golden stars, a sickle moon serving as the dot on the spire’s exclamation point.

They followed the red carpet through the lobby populated with black-and-white human-sized cutouts of the great gangster noir movie actors … James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino, Robert Mitchum and Barbara Stanwyck.

Beyond the double doors with the porthole windows, tommy guns rat-a-tatted and car brakes screeched as men groaned and women screamed. It sounded as much like a shooting gallery as the Santiago-occupied suite at the Crystal Phoenix had, but when two Fontana brothers swept the doors open, the movie “screen” before their eyes was a cutout set that they could walk right through.

Then they were strolling ill-lit alleyways littered by fallen bodies, with wax figures in trench coats huddled over submachine guns and a sound track blaring out threats and counterthreats and lines of immortal gangster-film dialogue, like “You dirty rat.”

“Dis is where the latest find will be,” Macho Mario said, adopting Chicago-style mobster diction like a theatrical pro.

“Latest find?” Van asked.

“Yeah. The body part that just surfaced from Lake Mead, now that the dried-up fringes uncovered some dirty work.”

“Surely,” Temple said, “the police wouldn’t release—”

“Vegas is not just some one-Bugsy burg,” Macho Mario said. “We have a Madam Tussauds wax museum in town. There are these mortuary artists or whatever from the morgue to the Madam’s working here. Macho Mario does not wait for things to become public domain. My domain is public. Voilà!”

Well, Temple thought, according to legend, the old-time gangsters did carry submachine guns in violin cases. She supposed that implied some “culture.”

Macho Mario whisked a black trench coat from what seemed a nearby hunched figure to reveal a display pedestal surmounted by a Plexiglas box. Through the clear plastic, one could view a glob of coagulated concrete from which two splintered shin bones stood up like giant toothpicks in an aspic of solid cement oatmeal.

“Oh, my God,” Van muttered, “shades of the Black Museum.”

“Black Museum?” Macho Mario was gratified by the reaction to his prize. “I like that title. This is just a mock-up of the latest body parts found in Lake Mead, but it will be in Gangsters upgraded Black Museum. Oh, wait! We gotta make clear we’re not celebrating black gangsta rappers. Boys, isn’t that going to be confusing?”

Yes, Temple thought, as the Fontana brothers rolled their eyes in unison.

“The Black Museum I was referring to,” Van explained, “is a very old, private, and venerable museum kept at Scotland Yard in London.”

“‘Venerable’?” Macho Mario rolled the word on his tongue like Mama Fontana’s world-famous pasta sauce. “That means fancy, right? Scotland Yard? That’s Sherlock Holmes stuff, right?”

Van absorbed Macho Mario’s further questions with inarticulate disbelief, while her husband placed a quieting palm on his uncle’s well-padded suit shoulder.

“Yeah,” Nicky said. “Pardon my wife’s shock. She’s a tender blossom, reared in Continental girls academies. The Black Museum hit her at quite an impressionable age. The museum is this ‘little shop of horrors,’ you could say, at Scotland Yard headquarters. Few outside the constabulary get in to see it, but her daddy was a major hotel manager—”

“Like you.” Macho Mario nodded seriously.

“Like me and Van. Only in London. Her father got them an ‘in,’ because this place is famously hard to get into.”

Macho Mario’s manicured hand lifted like an upscale traffic cop’s. “Say no more. That happens with them fancy French restaurants in Paris. You gotta reserve months in advance by letter. Now that is class. The Eiffel Tower joint at the Paris Hotel on the Strip is classy, but a letter in advance is real class.”

“Real class,” Nicky repeated. “And e-mail may do it nowadays. You must remember that Van’s father was German.”

“Sorry,” Macho Mario commiserated with Van, who was now biting her lip from either fury or laughter. “Italian is much better.”

Nicky soldiered on. “So Van was just twelve when they had the tour, and there was a pedestal like this one, with a clear cube atop it, only it was actually really thick glass.”

“This Plexiglas here is better than glass.” Macho Mario rapped thick knuckles on the surface, making an interior liquid quiver creepily. “It’s lighter. More modern. More expensive. Not breakable.”

“Absolutely, Uncle Mario.”

“I buy the best.”

“Of course, but back to the Black Museum,” Nicky said.

“Did it have all these lights and sound effects, eh? Like a gangster movie?”

“No,” Van finally said, speaking for herself, “it was just a series of offices then, really, with some framed Jack the Ripper notes on the wall, an acid murderer’s claw-footed bathtub, and tables of confiscated homemade weapons, including Freddy Krueger’s clawed gloves from the American horror film series, with human blood on the razor-blade nails.”

“Yeah? I’m impressed. That Freddy the Ripper! What a hit man! Dressed up like a movie creep and doing the serial-cutter crawl through London.”

“That’s not what made the biggest impression on Van,” Nicky said.

“Nor the Victorian Inquisition–like S-and-M machinery,” Van muttered under her breath to Temple, whose eyes widened.

“What in that office suite of horrors did impress you so much, little lady?” Macho Mario inquired delicately. “A knitting-needle murder weapon?”

“No, Uncle Mario,” Van answered as coolly as only Van could. “It was the glass display cube so like this one, also filled with some liquid or other.”

Macho Mario glanced at the concrete-booted shinbones. “Death by water would have kinda terrified this guy before his end came,” he said. “I can see how it scared a little girl like you.”